Lost Property

by Helen Paris

Familiar names left trailing. My own started to go quite near the start – a case of last in, first out, I suppose.

But then again, as Philippa has told me on more than one occasion, she was the surprise. I was the mistake. Maybe that’s why Mum forgets me. I was never supposed to be here in the first place.

‘Life gives us so much,’ Mr Appleby says, ‘chance, excitement and hope. But woven through it all is loss. If you try to pull out that thread, the whole thing unravels. Loss is the price we pay for love.’

‘Why, Dad? Didn’t you know that you were taking me with you when you jumped?’

We talked as if we were doing a complicated crossword where all the clues were cryptic and the answers were always in next week’s paper.

My two parents, caught in an uneven two-step, him wanting to be lost and her wanting to be found.

I look at my sister. How much I thought I knew – know – the imprint of my own sibling. I share her DNA. I know her habits, her particular scent, the triptych of moles beneath her left earlobe. I know the way she will react to a joke, answer the phone, the piece she will always pick in Monopoly (race car). How is it, then, that I can remember the most intimate details about Philippa – when she first got her period, the cuts around her ankles when she started to shave her legs – yet suddenly I can turn around and see an entirely different person?